INTERVIEW: DJ Speedsick

I just read your Wikipedia page, how do you feel about its existence?

Well, I think if it met Wikipedia’s relatively strict notability requirements, then I guess it deserves to exist in the same right that any article does. It doesn’t say much about me, though, because there isn’t much out there on me that Wikipedia considers citable. Save for some underground blogs people operate as passion projects, I’ve never been mentioned in any way by any extent of an established music publication or an institution that does music coverage.

Nothing I’ve released has ever been reviewed or featured anywhere. I think I’ve reached more people doing what I do solely by word of mouth, constantly creating and grinding, and having zero shame in self-promoting, than a lot of people get from institutional coverage whose names you can’t remember. Yet that kind of coverage entitles them to a Wikipedia page, by “notability” standards, long before I met them the ways I did – which I think was from mainstream fashion reporting that mentioned my score for a brand’s campaign launch; or from being selected by a top-40 artist as a supporting act on their Chicago tour date; both of which were obviously mentioned by “reliable sources”.

So how do I feel about that? I don’t know, but I think there’s an allegory there somewhere. I’m glad someone cared enough to write it.

It sounds like you see a distinct difference between fame and recognition. Can the latter be achieved without the former? 

I’m honestly not sure recognition without fame survives the way people want it to anymore. Maybe it exists in the moment, among the people who were actually there, but if it isn’t documented, it becomes very easy to erase or revise, with someone else shamelessly waiting to take credit for it. And that matters materially. It’s not just an ego thing. In the past, if someone was genuinely influential and that influence became publicly recognized, there was at least a clearer path toward being able to live from it. Not for everyone, and not fairly, but there were mechanisms: record sales, publishing, advances, commissions, touring, licensing, magazine work, grants, label money, whatever.

If your impact became visible enough, it could turn into a career. Now, you can influence a sound, a scene, an attitude, an aesthetic, or even the way other people position themselves, and the culture can absorb it almost instantly while giving you nothing durable in return. Recognition can circulate privately or socially, but the money and the official narrative often attach themselves somewhere else; usually to whoever is more visible, more marketable, or easier to package later.

And for me, that isn’t abstract. Poverty has probably been the single biggest deterrent to me doing more with whatever ability or vision I have. Not lack of ideas, not lack of work ethic, not lack of commitment. Second and third being disorganization and impatience, perhaps; maybe it’s all cyclical. But just the constant reality of being broke, trying to survive, taking jobs I hate, getting mentally and physically fried by them, and then having that dull my senses and put distance between me and the thing I’m actually here to do.

People talk about art like it happens in some pure spiritual zone, but it doesn’t. It happens through bodies, time, rent, exhaustion, equipment, travel, space, and the ability to keep your mind intact long enough to follow an idea all the way through. That’s the part that gets erased too. If someone influential doesn’t become famous enough to stabilize their life, their work doesn’t just remain “underground” in some romantic way. Their capacity gets actively reduced. They make less than they could have made. They disappear for stretches. They lose momentum. They burn out. They spend their sharpest hours doing things that have nothing to do with their gift.

A lot of the real movement happens before institutions notice. By the time someone writes the official version, half the evidence is gone, and the people with the biggest platforms get treated like the origin point. So if fame is what sets your efforts in stone, you better hope you get famous, because otherwise your impact can remain real but historically unstable; and materially unsupported.

I assume you also come from a background in hardcore/punk; how’d you end up making electronic music?

Very safe assumption; yes. I got into punk music the same way most kids born in the early-mid ’90s did: extreme sports video games, someone’s older brother’s skate videos and CDs they left in the car, going to skate parks and malls and letting gravity pull you toward other edgy or alternative people, talking to them, training yourself to remember every band they mentioned or wore t-shirts of, going home and looking them up on the family computer and downloading whatever the fuck you could remember off Kazaa or LimeWire. Drawing made-up logos of all the names you could remember on your notebook covers at school; so you’d never forget.

My pipeline into electronic music, though;  and first – I’ll say that I was never really distinctly not into it. But I’m from the generation that discovered music, in the most rudimentary sense, as nu-metal was climbing to its peak. To anyone who knew music prior to that in any formalistic sense, they were witnessing apocalyptic blasphemy from the hybridism of genres and styles, cultures, classes, clashing fundamentals and legacies. But to my ten-year-old ass sitting in the back seat of my mom’s car with a CD player listening to Hybrid Theory or Toxicity, I was just listening to this new thing I discovered called “music.” I didn’t know there was anything weird about guys yell-rapping over amen breaks and down-tuned guitar until way later on.

When I was like 16 or 17, still in high school, I joined a powerviolence band; a new crazy genre I’d just discovered on the internet; with some dudes in their early 20s who lived with a co-worker of mine. He introduced me to them after I showed up to my first day of work wearing a Spazz t-shirt. This was in the Milwaukee suburbs, where I grew up. They’d been doing the band for a bit, but had been without a bassist, so despite my age, it worked out perfectly. The singer/mastermind of the band, Lenny, had been dying to start driving the band full force. Thankfully, the Milwaukee scene was eager to welcome a crew of young kids doing their version of powerviolence, and we got offered shows left and right.

Milwaukee had an extremely sick grind scene, especially back in 2010-2013, but it didn’t have strict stylistic cohesion. I think that was a good thing. Grind bled naturally into its cousin genres, like noise, so on a few occasions my band got asked to play shows with touring noise artists. And I guess, maybe owing it to what I was describing with nu-metal before, my predisposition was to be open-minded about it. 

I mention noise because that really was what connected me into electronic music, but there were other buffers. When I moved to Chicago, I was primarily involved in the hardcore punk scene, as the golden era of Youth Attack and “mysterious guy hardcore” and the reign of Culo was playing out. But punk shows ended early, I wasn’t straight edge anymore, and at 19-21, I didn’t want to go home at 10 pm; I wanted to keep drinking and find people to have sex with like a normal late-teens-early-20s person, which led to me tagging along with older punk girls after shows, getting in cars, and going wherever they took me.

One time, that happened to be a legendary goth club in Chicago called NEO. I didn’t have an ID, and I was about to walk home defeated when one of the girls I was there with scanned the crowd outside, noticed the black checkmark on everyone’s hands, pulled out an eyeliner pen from her purse, made a similar mark on my hand, and pulled me into the club past the bouncers as they looked down and nodded. That night was one of the craziest nights of my life, and single-handedly exposed me to the deviance and excitement of “clubs” and electronic/industrial music, and began leading my life in that direction moving forward. 

At the same time, I was getting more curious about noise music, going to more noise-centric shows, and starting to mess around with making it myself. It was also a moment when electronic and dance music were beginning to cross-pollinate with the fringes of the punk scene in a very particular way. Prurient had just released Through the Window. Regis had redefined techno for the third or fourth time with In a Syrian Tongue. Hospital had released Silent Servant’s Negative Fascinations and debuted Vatican Shadow. Ascetic House was emerging. William Bennett was debuting Cut Hands. Records like that were sitting next to Andy Stott’s Luxury Problems in record stores.

There was this sleeping giant of a zeitgeist waiting to eclipse everything. I was in college, drawn to obscure things, extremely open-minded, monomaniacally ADHD, and very eager to experience anything that challenged perception or preconceptions. I also had to accept that even though I wanted to play in punk bands, I wasn’t very good at communicating my ideas to other people or working collaboratively. A roommate owed me for a utilities bill, and I ended up with a drum machine sampler. Then, a series of stressful, disenchanting experiences towards the end of 2016 forced me to rethink a lot of what I had spent my life observing. Winter was approaching, I was spending a lot of time inside, and I started recording myself messing around with the drum machine onto an old tape deck and… well, one thing led to another.

Do you still mainly use hardware? Or do you enjoy producing in DAWs too?

I’m mostly in Ableton now. I still perform live on hardware and use some hardware synths in the studio, but I did several lifetime’s worth of hardware production in the first 6-7 years I was making music, and truly one of my biggest goals was to be able to produce music in a DAW effectively, and I’ve finally reached the point where I can. And the whole time I was making music on hardware, I was still constantly dabbling with tracks made in Ableton; just not releasing any of it, or even exporting much of it ever. I never felt like anything was finished.

But I guess I was practicing, while mastering the same style of production – hardware, console, effects routing, mixdown – that the foundation of Ableton was built on, and what everyone making music before DAWs existed, that later transitioned into using them, did once, too. But I do gotta say; it blows my mind now when people hear something I made entirely in Ableton, and say it “has the classic Speedsick sound to it” because I always assumed that was something people associated with tape hiss, overdriven Tascam consoles, questionable line mixing levels; etc. I guess maybe it’s deeper than that. 

When you talk about being remembered, having a physical medium that’s appreciated and passed on comes to my mind. Especially since Snake Eyes & Sevens has been a big inspiration for me and many others. If there was one piece in your catalogue that was sent into space, which one would that be?

I’m glad to hear that about Snake Eyes, thanks for sharing that. It’s a hard question, though. Nothing Lasts is the obvious answer for a lot of people, but my relationship with that album is permanently strained due to the untimely death of someone close to me immediately after finishing it. I said for years that In Trances was my personal favorite, I think just because it was so bleak and sounded the way it would feel to get dragged around by a truck until there was nothing left of you. But, I’ve got to go with Spiral ‘07. Because you could find that tape at any time in the past or future and it’d feel like something alien. And I think if anyone were to discover my music, that feeling’s where I’d want them to start.

What was Chicago like 10 years ago? I was a big fan of Chicago Research.

Ten years ago today, as of when I’m writing this, was May 25, 2016. I was 23, and about a month out from the biggest, wildest, most overwhelming opportunity I’d ever gotten as a kid who booked shows: hosting the late and great Silent Servant at a warehouse/loft-type space called Club Rectum, with Beau Wanzer and Special Guest DJ. Club Rectum, up until that point, was pretty much strictly a noise and hardcore punk/grind venue. Nothing really comparable to this was happening in Chicago then, at least not in the way it was happening in LA or NYC. But there was a renaissance, or zeitgeist, or whatever less annoying word you want to use for it, coming on quick.

I’d done some other ambitious shows, with the help of Tim Nordberg, for Nostilevo, some Ascetic House people, High Functioning Flesh and Body of Light in the months prior, and Shy/Special Guest DJ, who now runs 3XL in Berlin, was throwing these – for lack of better words; “vague” after-hours techno monthlies called Dance Tutorial in the basement of a funeral home, which became a ritual for a very specific sampling of underground art/music-adjacent people, and anyone else down with the insouciant, devious vibes of casual substance abuse, fog overdosing, and walking home when it was light out with someone you just met there. And obviously, Beau Wanzer’s legendary monthly Hot On The Heel at Danny’s Bar – which I cut my teeth DJing at – was at its peak and providing a consistent backbone for everything adjacent to it and giving everyone an excuse to party like a weekend for one Tuesday a month.

You have to remember, this was 2016. None of this was really a thing yet, especially not here. “Techno” or “raves” were not on the radar of the common person in their 20s or 30s participating in urban or art-school-adjacent nightlife. People still thought of festival dubstep. Nobody was a DJ yet, even. It was mostly live hardware PAs by skinny dudes with hand tattoos who cut their own hair. But, at that point, noise shows were bringing huge crowds. It was insane. Mixed bills with noise, punk, and industrial were becoming more common, with DJs added between sets.

This was the shit I had been pushing and trying to spearhead for the last few years, and other people were starting to do it too. It was finally working. My goal all along was to get a lot of people out to things that might have only drawn half a room on their own, and to basically force people to be open-minded about music and the people around them.

So something big and exciting like the Silent Servant show was coming. And then it did. I still think that night single-handedly marked the beginning of a new era in Chicago underground music, especially electronic and dance music. It was the first time where all the music people who had been on the fringes were in the same room as the “cool” art-school kids; hot people, basically; and everyone was kind of humbled by each other in a way that made everyone have a great fucking time. There were people from every corner of scenes that weren’t explicitly dance music, but were curious and knew that what was happening was a big deal they should witness. People went on about that night for years. Several people I remember visiting Chicago for the first time to attend that ended up moving here shortly after.

I kept throwing similar parties like that up until the end of 2016, which was great until it wasn’t. I’d rather focus on the positive side of all that, but the reality is that when good things hit big or hit quick, there’s always an opposite reaction coming from somewhere. Egos from the sideline you didn’t know existed start feeling taunted and intimidated. I was in a vulnerable position, trying to please everyone, dependent on false pretenses of support or community or shared ideals. And when you put yourself in that position and see that side of people, you never unsee it. Very, very few people understand what it feels like when you have. But ultimately, albeit chaotically, that’s what redirected my life onto its current path. I sure didn’t see anything that followed coming.

And what was Chicago Research doing during all that? Well, I know JB was always doing cool shit and sharing a similar vision as me. The others? Probably in someone’s apartment, listening to a Coneheads tape they thought was going to be worth more than $8 today, thinking about how cool it was to be one of the people who really “got” Wire, and how they were going to make that known somehow, in between making jokes about all the “cokeheads” going to those lame dance music parties. But hey, at least everyone knew who to ask what the difference between egg punk and chain punk was, right?

At least until one of their fraternity brothers was tipped off that maybe all this industrial-electronic music they thought was electroclash was actually getting cool, and people really were moving away from punk into it. And if they acted quick, they could take something other people had built, something everyone was having fun experiencing with liberated sentiments, and gentrify it into an elitist, fashionable boys club they could claim as their own. Suddenly every other pretentious, try-hard poser you stopped seeing at shows a couple years ago was friends with them and owned a modular synth now too. God forbid you ever mention anyone else that walked just so they could run.

Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between that era and today, where young electronic producers are more inspired by Skrillex than post-punk. Yet you are also working with commercial brands – how does that rhyme with being underground?

I got a DM in my requests inbox one day on instagram asking if I wanted to do some musical collaborations for fashion campaigns. I thought it was a scam, or bot junk, and responded with nothing but my email. To my surprise, someone reached out and it was 100% legit. It was a post-production studio that Jordan Hemingway works with. He’d been shown my music by a mutual of ours years prior, and completely unbeknownst to me, was a huge fan. They were looking for an experimental music producer to score a series of campaigns they were about to begin production on, and my name came to mind.

Frankly, I had no problem accepting the money offered for it. I enjoyed doing the work a lot, in the sense that I like challenging myself creatively and branching out from my comfort zones as a musician, without compromising. Nothing changed about what I was doing: making music that I enjoy hearing, in my bedroom studio, which is exactly what I’ve been doing since day one.

I don’t really buy into the idea that being underground means proving your purity by staying broke, or that commercial work automatically corrupts you if the work itself hasn’t changed. To me, the issue is whether you start making worse, safer, more obedient music because you’re trying to be accepted by some institution. That’s not what happened. Someone came to me because of what I already do, paid me to do it, and I did it. I’m not interested in anyone pretending there’s something morally noble about refusing rent money just to satisfy someone else’s fantasy of what underground credibility is supposed to look like.

Anything interesting happening in Chicago at the moment?

If there is, it’s definitely being drowned out by this new perverse homage to the “underground” that got ushered in post-Covid. You can spend a night out and meet ten different people who call themselves DJs and leave with the impression that maybe one of them actually likes music. If Berlin is the Mecca of electronic music, Chicago is the Chernobyl. 

Most of the scene at this point feels held hostage by self-absorbed, mean-spirited bullies who appointed themselves the structural and moral authority of the city’s “underground,” only tolerating people who are equally talentless reflections of themselves while acting like there’s something noble about being mediocre. They weaponize the language of morality into sadistic struggle sessions about whoever they feel like dehumanizing that week: labeling people problematic, publicly humiliating them, invading their privacy, projecting whatever horrible judgmental assumption comes to mind quickest, then expecting everyone to believe they’re “good people” for it.

Then the alternative is a different version of the “underground” that aspiring EDM-festival DJs and promoters have co-opted as a stepping stone into the festival circuit, polluting everything with inoffensive, generic, mass-appealing garbage for EDM crowds and slapping on diffident, AI-looking artwork reminiscent of a poster reminding you to punch in at work in a corporate break room. Playing top-40 remixes in a warehouse doesn’t make it “underground.” And if any of these clout-demon hype beasts ever got the opportunity to ascend to the mainstream American TikTok techno circuit, they’d never over their dead bodies look back to the “underground” they spent all their time up until then “supporting.”

To the general public, “underground” just means “not famous yet,” but that’s hardly what it meant to anyone actually participating in it. It meant choosing to abstain from the mainstream, and having a place to incubate new, challenging, transgressive ideas without stakes or expectations, around other like-minded people. Now that the doors somehow got opened to average civilians, that meaning has been de-platformed and dislocated.

So yeah, I’m sure there are interesting things happening; it’s a fucking major American city. But anything interesting probably isn’t being celebrated, platformed, or even allowed to breathe with how much oxygen is being stolen. Chicago is in the dark, predictable epoch every city with a once-cool thing eventually hits: spoiled babies show up expecting a slice of it with no effort, the people who made it worth caring about pack up and leave, and what’s left is 2.73 million DJs expecting to get booked, either smiling through brown-nosed networking or ruthlessly beefing, defaming, and canceling each other over scraps of opportunity, and like 0.000011 million people trying to build new spaces or facilitate platforms. 

The most tragic thing about the underground is the way it inevitably calcifies. There is a specific, cynical game people play: they wait for something unique to be built – an institution, a sound, a bridge between scenes – and then, the moment it gains any visibility, the opportunists swoop in. It’s like they can’t help themselves. They don’t want to be the architects; they want to be the moral auditors. It’s definitely the easier of the two. Once they realize that if they can frame whatever built something like it’s some kind of fed, they suddenly get to claim the moral high ground as opposition to it.

It’s a convenient way to strip-mine the history and collect the loose change from its pockets for themselves. They don’t engage with the work, ideas, or labor; they engage with the optics. They rebrand the purveyors as elitists so they can play the role of the “noble insurgent”. It’s a cheap stratagem that allows them to annex the scene, rewrite the history, and claim the “underground” as their own personal gated community, all while acting like they’re the ones being oppressed. It’s not about art; it’s about control. Imagine trying to feel good about that.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your time with us.

All artwork by DJ Speedsick.